


the wolf, the mongering wolf

by zjofierose



Series: star, star verse (YOI poly verse) [13]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Crying, Depression, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorders, Established Relationship, Fights, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Polyamory, Post-Canon, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28604805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: Day 3 of YOI Rarepair Week 2021! Prompt was "secrets". PLEASE mind the tags - there's nothing graphic and most of it's in the past, but there's some heavy stuff in here.Titles for all of this week's fics are from here:After LovePlease see end notes for clarification on the tags.
Relationships: Otabek Altin/Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov/Yuri Plisetsky
Series: star, star verse (YOI poly verse) [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1596319
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: YOI Rare Pair Week 2021





	the wolf, the mongering wolf

**Author's Note:**

> Day 3 of YOI Rarepair Week 2021! Prompt was "secrets". PLEASE mind the tags - there's nothing graphic and most of it's in the past, but there's some heavy stuff in here.
> 
> Titles for all of this week's fics are from here: [After Love](https://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/634150935491493888/after-love)
> 
> Please see end notes for clarification on the tags.

1)

Victor is a silent crier.

At first, Yuuri thinks that this is because he doesn’t want to make a scene; maybe, he thinks, when they were alone in that hotel room, Victor was worried that someone in one of the adjoining rooms would hear him, or he was embarrassed and hoping Yuuri wouldn’t notice. While Yuuri sobs noisily in toilet stalls, in the locker room, in parking garages, in the onsen, when he sees an especially cute dog, Victor will shed a single silent tear. Or sometimes a storm of them, each of them equally unnoticed, each one equally quiet. 

Yuuri doesn’t think much of it. Victor carries all of his emotions so close to his chest, only expressing the ones he wants people to see, to associate with him. Cheerfulness, determination, friendliness. Dedication, genius. Joy is the most genuine of Victor’s public emotions, and he displays it freely and exuberantly. Still, even there, it’s the quiet joys that are private, that Yuuri learns to see after Victor comes to Hasetsu.

And yet - even when alone, Victor weeps in quiet. 

The only reason Yuuri knows this is because he walks in on Victor in the locker room one day as he peels a bloody sock off what’s clearly a newly sprained toe, and watches as silent tears drip onto the battered leather of Victor’s boot. Victor’s not even breathing unevenly. 

“Vitya,” Yuuri exclaims, “are you okay?”

“Oh, Yuuri!” Victor turns his face to Yuuri and smiles, tears still leaking from the corners of his eyes as he tapes his toe with the rhythmic motions of long practice. “There you are! I wanted to talk to you about that step sequence in the third minute.”

“ _ Vitya _ ,” Yuuri says, staring at him. “Your toe? Do you need to go to the nurse?”

“What? No.” Victor frowns. “It’s just sprained. It’ll be fine.” 

“You’re crying,” Yuuri tells him gently, wiping Victor’s face with his jacket sleeve. 

“Oh.” Victor looks surprised, then confused. “It just hurts, that’s all. I’m fine.” He packs up his stuff and shoves his feet into his street shoes, smiling even as another tear slides down his face. “Are you ready? Let’s go!”

\--

2)

Yuuri knows, in the abstract, that Victor has access to his medical history on account of his being Yuuri’s coach. He also knows that Victor had a few extensive conversations with Celestino early on, for background on Yuuri’s technique progression and program selections, as well as a few with Phichit, for background on Yuuri generally. 

Somehow it still surprises him when he moves into Victor’s apartment, and the kitchen is- well. Set up for his particular needs. 

Victor, in his usual blithe fashion, catches Yuuri poking around the cabinets and addresses it head on. 

“Your therapist noted that it can be helpful for you to indulge in the control-related aspects of your diet because it reduces anxiety, so I got you two different food scales. There are also several measuring cups in the second drawer, and I bought the kinds of snacks that Phichit says you will still eat even when you’re off everything else.” He gestures at a door at the far end of the kitchen that must be a pantry. “There are some similar things in Russia that you may not have tried before, too, so I picked up some of those for you, too. You might want to try them soon, so that you know if you like them or not before you get to the point where you’re not able to try anything new. Phichit said that’s usually a week or two before a competition.”

Yuuri blinks, his face flushing. It’s humiliating to have his issues with food laid bare like this. Even Phichit - even  _ Mari _ \- talks around it as much as possible, only pushing the envelope when he’s to the point of skipping meals or obsessing. 

“Vitya,” he chokes out, tongue thick with horror. Victor just continues on.

“We’ll take most of our meals at the sports complex, which I know is different from Detroit, but I hope that will be okay for you? And if it’s not, we can figure out something else. But they have a very good nutritionist on staff, and you can make an appointment with them to go over the ingredients and measurements of what’s served if it will make you feel better.” Victor opens another cupboard. “I’d rather you didn’t store food anywhere other than the kitchen because of Makkachin, but I did get these glass storage containers, so if you feel like you do need to, just use one of them, okay?”

“ _ Victor _ ,” Yuuri hisses, and Victor stops, turning to look at him. 

“Oh,” he says, “Oh, Yuuri, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t,” Yuuri says, and then buries himself in Victor’s sweat-shirted chest so that he doesn’t have to look him in the eyes. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

Victor’s arms come around him carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice earnest. “But this is a legitimate medical issue that it’s important for me to know about and address as your coach.”

“I know.” Yuuri sighs. “I just. It’s  _ embarrassing _ to be so weak. I hate that you know about it.”

“Yuuri.” Victor’s tone changes from gentle to firm. “Having anxiety, having an eating disorder - these do not make you weak. Being an internationally ranked athlete in  _ spite _ of having anxiety and an eating disorder - that means you’re strong.”

“It means I can’t function like a normal human,” Yuuri mutters, but lets Victor’s arms hold him close. He is grateful, he supposes. He hopes, like he always does, that this is the year he won’t need to count calories, that this is the year he won’t struggle to put bites in his mouth, or choke down a granola bar, or try to determine how much he can reasonably deduct from the bathroom scale’s number based on whether or not he’s taken a recent shit. 

But if history is any indicator, it won’t be. And so it’s comforting to know that it’s not a secret, not a real one, and that everything here is ready for him, whether he’s weak or strong. 

“Thank you,” he sighs, and Victor presses a kiss to his head.

“Of course,” Victor answers, and leaves it at that.

\--

3)

Otabek moves to St. Petersburg in August. It’s still beautiful out - warm days, short nights, people in the streets and parks and on the river. He gets an apartment close to the rink and walking distance from Victor’s, where Yuuri has also lived for two years now and where Yuri spends nearly all his time, though he ostensibly still lives with Yakov and Lilia. 

It’s nice. He likes it. 

Leaving Almaty after only spending three years back is hard. He’s moved around so much that he knows how to do it, knows even how to do it well. And of course Russian is nearly as familiar a language to him as his native Kazakh, so he doesn’t have to do the work this time of navigating an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar language, which is nice. 

And he has his friends. His lovers, though that word seems new and strange to him, even after several months. He doesn’t want to be dependent, though, doesn’t want to stress this thing they have with being too needy, too soon. He values his autonomy, always has- he wants to encounter the world on his own terms, to establish himself in a place on his own merits. 

It all goes really well, at first. He settles into the rink, and even if he doesn’t have a proper coach, he has at least three  _ de facto _ coaches in Victor, Yuuri, and Yakov. It’s more than enough for the time being, giving him the feedback he needs to grow and shape his next programs. He talks over program music with Leo, swaps choreography ideas with Seung-Gil. He buys a plant and sets it in the window, stocks his fridge and invests in a new couch. 

Then winter comes. 

It’s not that he doesn’t know how to deal with winter - Almaty is in the mountains; snow and sleet and freezing wind have been a part of his entire life, including his time in Canada and America, because heaven forbid he end up training somewhere nice like Los Angeles. 

But St. Petersburg is a new kind of cold. It’s damp cold, wind-off-the-ocean cold, frozen-rivers-in-the-middle-of-the-city cold. And worse, it’s  _ dark _ . Otabek wakes in the dark, trains in the dark, goes to the rink in the dark, comes home in the dark, goes to bed in the dark. 

His apartment is no better - he refuses to leave the heat on while he’s gone because it’s wasteful, so he comes home to a freezing studio bereft of daylight, where even turning on the overhead lights becomes an effort he barely finds worth making. What’s the point? It only shows him the emptiness of it all - the dishes that need to be done, the laundry poured on the couch but not yet folded. The limp leaves of the plant in his windowsill that probably needs more light and heat than he’s been giving it. 

He keeps going, because that’s what he does. He gets up. He goes to the rink. He lands jump after jump after jump. Sometimes, he falls. He goes home. He gets up again.

Sometimes, he thinks, that’s his whole life: He gets up again. 

\--

In November, Otabek catches a bad cold. 

He takes two days off to recover, but doesn’t realize he’s forgotten to even mention it to anyone until Yuuri shows up at his door and lets himself in with the spare key.

“Beka?”

The voice from the door has Otabek dragging himself upright, grimacing at the state of his surroundings. Tissues pile by the wastebasket, takeout containers litter the counter. He hasn’t bathed in days. 

“Oh, Ota-kun,” Yuuri says, and deposits the sack of groceries he’s carrying on the counter. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Otabek grimaces. “I’m sorry. I just… didn’t think to, I guess.” He flops back down in bed, listening as Yuuri bustles around the kitchen. It must be his off day. “I didn’t think I was that sick. I didn’t want to alarm anyone.”

Yuuri puts the kettle on, then comes and settles on the edge of the bed. “I don’t mean that. Though,” he tips his head, “you definitely should have told us about being sick, too. We were worried. But I meant, why didn’t you tell us you have depression?”

Otabek stares at him. His head feels like it’s full of cotton wool, but Yuuri’s words don’t make any more sense after a minute than they did at first.

“I don’t?” he answers finally, struggling back upright. “I’m just sick.”

Yuuri eyeballs him dubiously, then glances around the apartment. “It’s okay to be depressed, Beka. It doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t define you as a person.”

It’s clearly rehearsed, a mantra that Yuuri has repeated, but it only confuses Otabek even more. 

“I agree,” he says, “but I still don’t have depression.”

Yuuri just pats his leg. “Okay,” he says. “Why don’t you take a shower. It’ll clear your head. And then you can have some soup.”

Otabek breathes out, his whole body feeling shaky. “Yeah,” he says, “thanks, Yuuri. That sounds good.”

\--

4)

The first time they all end up in bed together, it goes like this: 

“You can’t hold me down,” Yuri tells them, “or pull my hair. Anything else, I’m probably okay with, but I don’t want to feel trapped or restricted.”

“...okay?” Otabek says, down to his boxers and frowning. “I don’t think any of us were planning on doing that, but that’s good to know.”

“Yura,” Yuuri says softly, fidgeting with the comforter, “have you, um. Have you done this before?”

Yuri folds his arms across his bare chest. There’s a blooming love mark on the side of his neck, but his expression is fierce and challenging. “Technically, yes. Actually, no.”

Victor’s the first to get it, and he recoils hard, pulling his hand off Yuri’s bare, muscled thigh like he’s been burned. Yuri flinches, but grabs Victor’s hand and puts it right back. 

“I want this, Vitya,” he says, voice sharp. “I’m not fragile. I _want_ this.”

Otabek has a slowly dawning look of understanding on his face, but he keeps himself pressed against Yuri’s side. 

“You’re sure?” he asks carefully, and Yuri rolls his eyes. 

“ _ Yes _ , I’m fucking sure. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t. I’m just telling you because you and Vitya are always going on about _ ‘the importance of communication in a relationship’ _ bullshit.”

Yuuri still looks confused. “Okay, we won’t restrain you. What if we accidentally pull your hair or something though? I mean, just… there are four of us? Like if someone’s fingers just get caught?”

Yuri rolls his eyes hard, then leans forward to capture Yuuri’s mouth in a filthy kiss.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says when he pulls back. “Just shut up and suck my dick, Katsudon.”

Yuuri smiles happily. “Okay!” he says, and proceeds as instructed.

\--

5) 

“Grandpa says only people who were abused as kids cry silently,” Yuri says to Victor one morning, apropos of nothing, and watches carefully as Victor goes completely, breathlessly still.

“Does he.”

Victor unfreezes, and continues making coffee, his long fingers pale on the dark tin of grounds. There’s a lingering chill to him that wasn’t there before. 

“He does,” Yuri continues, hopping up on the counter and banging his heels on the cabinets below. Victor hates it when he does that. “He says that it’s because making noise when we cry is a request to be comforted, and kids who were abused learned not to do it. They weren’t going to be comforted, and they might get punished.”

“How interesting.” Victor’s voice could frost over the measuring scoop in his hands.

“He also says that you can’t trust those people as adults, because they’ll keep everything too quiet until it’s too late. I think he’s wrong, though.”

Victor slides the filter with the grounds into the coffeemaker and snaps the lid on the tin viciously closed. 

“Do you.”

“Yeah,” Yuri gives a punctuating bang of his heels to the cupboards below. “Yeah, I trust you.”

Victor’s hands settle on the counter slowly, carefully, as he turns to face Yuri. His eyes glitter and his smile is about two shades too bright for the dim winter light in their shared kitchen. 

“And what about you, Yurio?” he asks, voice effortlessly cheerful. “What’s it like when you cry? Do you shout and stomp your feet like a teenager? Do you blubber and sob like a baby? Or do you sit there silently weeping like the child you are, waiting for a mother who will never come back?”

He turns away, deftly slots the coffee tin back in the cupboard, and walks out of the room while Yuri gapes open-mouthed after him.

“Fuck you,” Yuri says as soon as he’s recovered his voice. The first one is shaky and high, so he repeats it for good measure. “ _ Fuck _ you.”

\---

6) 

“So,” Otabek says, walking in the door of Victor’s apartment one evening in January and toeing off his shoes. “I have seasonal depression.”

Three sets of eyes blink up at him from the couch. “Congratulations?” Yuri ventures, and Otabek laughs.

“I had never even thought about it as a possibility,” he says, coming around the end of the couch and flopping down on it. “But when I had that bad cold back in November, Yuuri assumed I was depressed.”

Yuuri ducks his head and blushes. “I’m sorry!” he says, “I just thought that you looked like how I did in Detroit.”

“No, I’m glad you said it,” Otabek tells him, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. “I went and talked to one of the rink’s doctors about it, and they diagnosed me with seasonal depression.” He laughs. “I just always thought winters were really hard!”

Yuuri makes a sympathetic face. “Winters in St. Petersburg  _ are _ really hard,” he says, and Victor pulls an offended face. 

“What are they gonna do? Put you on drugs?” Yuri asks, poking a finger into Victor’s ribs as he splutters. 

“Not yet,” Otabek tells him. “They’re making me buy a fancy light that pretends to be the sun, and I’m supposed to sit under it for two hours a day and then take some vitamins.” He shrugs. “They said that they’ll consider medication if that doesn’t help, but we’ll start with this.”

Yuuri smiles over at him. “That’s good, Beka.”

“Yeah,” Otabek says, smiling back. “Yeah, it is.”

\--

7)

“Eat,” Yuri says, dropping a plate of fresh piroshki in front of Yuuri sometime in early March. “I know Victor’s letting you live on nutritionally balanced granola bars and juice right now, but that’s bullshit.”

Yuuri stares at his fingers. “I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care,” Yuri tells him. “I made you piroshki. You’re getting too thin. You’re not going to be good competition at Worlds next week.”

“If they’re katsudon piroshki, I can’t eat them,” Yuuri says. “I haven’t won anything.”

“First of all,” Yuri reaches over and cuts a still-steaming piroshki into thirds, “they’re not. I’m not an idiot. Second of all,” he says stabbing one of the thirds with the fork, “you won gold at Four Continents like a month ago.”

“But I-”

“Already had your katusdon for that, I know. These are just regular ones. Now eat.”

Yuuri sighs and fiddles with his hands some more. “Yura, I don’t know-”

“I won’t watch,” Yuri tells him. “But I’m not going anywhere.” He kicks his feet up onto another chair and pulls out his phone. 

Yuuri watches him for a long while. Then he takes a bite.

**Author's Note:**

> Yuuri suffers from an unspecified eating disorder as a result/in relation to his anxiety. Otabek has depression. Victor is heavily implied to have suffered from some form of childhood abuse, as is Yuri. Yuri is heavily implied to have been sexually assaulted. Also, Victor is at one point very mean to Yuri (out of defensiveness), and Yuri forces Yuuri to eat, which works, but is maybe not a great thing to do to someone with disordered eating. 
> 
> Please know that this is speculative fiction and is not meant to be representative of all experiences with any of these conditions. If you suffer from any of these conditions, please know that you're not alone, and that there's help out there to help you cope. <3


End file.
